Animal sentience law has finally caught up with Plutarch’s thinking
Almost no ancients cared whether animals felt pain or not. The classical Stoic belief that man’s reasoning capacity elevated him above all other creatures was the intellectual justification. Cruelty to animals could be frowned upon, but only because it might encourage man’s cruelty to man. Descartes (d. 1650) raised the question of whether animals really were conscious and, deciding they were not, concluded they did not feel pain: their reaction to it was purely mechanistic. Behaviourists of the 20th century took the same line. But there is one ancient dissenting voice to that view: the Greek essayist Plutarch (c. ad 100). Now that UK law has legislated that animals are